A Democratic candidate in a crucial Senate battleground showdown is taking plenty of incoming fire from his primary rivals as well as the Republican contender in the race as he prepares to team up on Tuesday with a controversial far-left online streamer.

Abdul El-Sayed, the 2018 Michigan Democratic gubernatorial runner-up who is backed by progressive champion Sen. Bernie Sanders I-Vt., as he seeks his party’s 2026 Senate nomination, is scheduled to hold campus rallies at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University with Hasan Piker, as well as with progressive Rep. Summer Lee of Pennsylvania.

Piker, a potent progressive influencer, could help boost El-Sayed in a competitive and combustible Democratic Senate nomination race thanks to his millions of younger, progressive social media followers on YouTube, Instagram and X.

But the appearance at the campus rallies by Piker — who once said “America deserved 9/11,” and who critics argue is antisemitic due to his sharp criticism of the Israeli government and the downplaying of the Oct. 7, 2023 Hamas attack on Israel — is alarming to many Democrats.

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El-Sayed’s top two rivals for the nomination have blasted his scheduled appearance with Piker, which was announced less than two weeks after a man rammed his truck into a Michigan synagogue, wounding a guard in what authorities said was a targeted act of domestic terrorism against the Jewish community.

“It is unacceptable for a candidate wanting to represent all Michiganders to campaign with Hasan Piker, a person who is unapologetic about a career of making hurtful and anti-Semitic comments,” Rep. Haley Stevens said in a statement. “With all that’s at stake in this election, we should be focused on the challenges Michiganders are facing and how to fight for them.”

And State Senator Mallory McMorrow, in an interview with the Jewish Insider, called Piker “somebody who says extremely offensive things in order to generate clicks.”

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“That is not somebody that you should be campaigning with at a moment when there is clearly a lot of pain and trauma across our state,” McMorrow added. “You don’t fan the flames and stoke division just to get attention.”

El-Sayed, Stevens, and McMorrow will face off in an early August primary.

It’s not just El Sayed’s Democratic nomination rivals who are criticizing his decision to team up with Piker.

Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin of Michigan and the Anti-Defamation League have charged Piker is antisemitic and Matt Bennett, a leader of the well-known moderate Democratic group the Third Way, slammed El-Sayed as a “disgrace to the Democratic Party.”  

Former Republican Rep. Mike Rogers, who’s on a glidepath to the GOP Senate nomination in Michigan for a second straight cycle, told Fox News Digital in a statement, “If you would have told me a few years ago that Democrat frontrunners would campaign with known antisemites, I would’ve thought you were crazy. But one thing Abdul continues to prove, there’s no limit to how far left Democrats will go.”

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“From calling to defund the police and make Michigan a sanctuary state, to attempting to abolish private healthcare, and now campaigning with an antisemite who claimed ‘America deserved 9/11,’ one thing that’s for certain: Abdul and the Democrats are too radical for Michigan,” Rogers argued.

In the wake of the deadly Oct. 7, 2023, attack that incited Israel’s war with Gaza, Piker described Hamas, a terrorist organization, as the “lesser of two evils” in the conflict.

Once, when asked if he supported terrorism, Piker answered by saying, “No, I don’t. I don’t support the state of Israel, and I don’t support the state of the United States of America.”

He also faced backlash for praising the “brave” “mujahideen” who injured Rep. Dan Crenshaw, R-Texas, who lost an eye in Afghanistan.

“What the f— is wrong with this dude? Didn’t he go to war and like literally lose his eye because some mujahideen—a brave f—ing soldier—f—ed his eye hole with their d—?” Piker said.

El-Sayed has repeatedly stood his ground in defending his appearances with Piker. The candidate noted that Piker was allowed by Democrats to stream at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago.

“It’s about speaking to a broader audience,” El-Sayed said last week in an appearance on Fox News’ “America’s Newsroom.”

El-Sayed emphasized that “just because you invite somebody to campaign with you or you’re engaging with them does not mean that you agree with them….Every day, 30,000 people and counting tune in to Hassan’s stream. A lot of folks who don’t watch Fox News, they don’t watch CNN, they don’t watch MSNBC.”

The Senate race in Michigan is one of a handful in this year’s midterm elections that will determine if the Republicans hold their 53-47 majority in the chamber. Michigan, where Democratic Sen. Gary Peters is retiring, is one of the National Republican Senatorial Committee’s (NRSC) top targets as they try to not only hold onto their seats, but also possibly expand their majority.

Jeffrey Epstein is not the only sexual predator who was embraced by Democrats.  Consider the case of farmworkers union leader Cesar Chavez.

All over the U.S., civil rights organizations are tearing down statues of Chavez. Celebrations of the late labor leader are being cancelled, and schools that honored him are being renamed.

The speed with which progressive groups have tossed the Latino icon overboard is stunning and suggests this: they knew. 

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They knew about the horrific sexual abusesexual abuse of girls as young as 13, reported in recent weeks by the New York Times. They knew that Chavez raped and impregnated a 15-year-old girl, who in later years attempted suicide, and routinely sexually abused other young women. But the left kept silent. Political opportunism trumped protecting women from a sexual predator.

The Times report has not led to lengthy investigations or hearings pondering the “allegations.” There has been no push-back from Chavez’ family or friends – not even from the United Farm Workers union, which he founded. Indeed, the Times acknowledges, “A handful of Mr. Chavez’s relatives and former U.F.W. leaders have been aware for years about various allegations of sexual misconduct, but there is no evidence that they made efforts to fully investigate the accusations…”

The Chavez revelations remind us yet again that Democrats, who pretend to care about women, are profoundly hypocritical. In explaining why his city is scrubbing Chavez’ name from schools and parks, San Fernando Mayor Joel Fajardo said the speedy do-over was necessary “to let our children know that we took this seriously, to make sure that we have a society that values the victims, that trusts the survivors.”

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Is that true? Consider the case of Tara Reade, who credibly accused then-presidential candidate Joe Biden of sexually assaulting her when she worked for him as an aide in 1993. Reade went public with the sordid accusations in 2020, months before the election that landed Democrat Biden in the Oval Office. NPR and other outlets, including the New York Times, found that Reade had recounted the incident, in which she claimed Biden pushed her up against a wall, lifted her skirt and digitally penetrated her, to a close friend soon after the incident.

The friend, Lynda LaCasse, described herself to a New York Times reporter as a “very strong Democrat,” who supported Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren during the primaries and intends to support Biden in the general election.” She was not a GOP operative. As NPR wrote, “She said she felt compelled to share ‘the truth’ despite her personal politics.”

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Given Biden’s reputation for inappropriately touching women, and his daughter’s recollection of her dad’s (“probably not appropriate”) showering with her at a young age, Reade’s story is entirely believable. But Nancy Pelosi, at that time House speaker, said she had “great comfort” with Biden’s denials, and the world moved on. Reade, saying she was being threatened and was afraid for her life, moved to Russia, and that was that. Whatever Biden did, Democrats simply put politics first.

An even more astounding example of Democrats throwing victims under the bus comes, of course, from the seedy history of former President Bill Clinton, close friend of Jeffrey Epstein. Juanita Broaddrick accused the former president of raping her in 1978 in her hotel room; she varied her story over the years, including at one time recanting the charges in an affidavit relating to similar accusations from a woman named Paula Jones. But in 1999 she came forward, recounting again the alleged rape in an NPR interview. Broaddrick, too, had told a friend about the incident at the time. She, too, was credible.

And Broaddrick’s story, like that of Reade, fits well with the known behavior of Clinton, who was also accused of sexual assault by Jones and Kathleen Willey. Jones, who claimed Clinton had assaulted her in her hotel room, eventually settled a civil suit against the former president, for $850,000.

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And, by all means, let us not forget Monica Lewinsky, a 22-year-old White House intern who had oral sex with Bill Clinton in the Oval Office. And, Clinton’s many trips on Epstein’s Lolita Express.  

These are stories from the past, but there are plenty of modern-day examples of liberal disdain for women. Remember Vice President Kamala Harris’ husband Doug Emhoff, who cheated on his first wife by impregnating the family’s nanny, and was credibly accused of assaulting a former girlfriend. Nonetheless, the Washington Post’s Catherine Rampell described him as a “Modern-Day Sex Symbol” and gushed that he was an “ideal partner.”

Worse, consider the silence from the left about the Iranian women’s soccer team, who defied their country’s brutal regime by refusing to sing their national anthem. A number of players initially sought asylum in Australia, where they had competed in the Women’s Asian Cup, but after they and their families were threatened by Iran’s thuggish mullahs, they returned home to an uncertain fate.

Our hearts break for them, but not the hearts of those like soccer star Megan Rapinoe, who finally uttered some supportive words after being criticized for her multi-day silence.

And what about the left’s love affair with trans women, which has led to the thrashing of outspoken women like J.K. Rowling, author of the beloved Harry Potter books? Rowling, a defender of same-sex marriage and abortion rights, dared to criticize biological men competing against women, and was viciously canceled by the left. 

Riley Gaines, a 12-time NCAA All-American swimmer, has been insulted and on one occasion assaulted by protesters enraged by her resistance to trans competitors.

Encouraging biological men to play against women in sports is the essential insult to girls and women who work hard to succeed, only to find themselves defeated by people who are naturally stronger and faster.

Liberal women are Democrats’ most reliable voters. But they should realize that they are valued mainly as political tools by the left. After all, Democrats cannot even define what a woman is. That says it all.

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As President Donald Trump grapples with our trade relationships around the world, one longstanding issue has emerged: Europe’s unfair, anticompetitive trade policies governing tech and telecom. America’s innovators and job creators have been treated unfairly for far too long. 

U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer recently announced two new Section 301 investigations related to forced labor and manufacturing. Rumblings in Washington, alongside warnings from senior administration officials, indicate that the Trump administration might soon launch a Section 301 investigation into Europe’s discriminatory digital policies. Such a probe is long overdue and should be welcomed. 

But a fair, balanced and transparent digital partnership with our European friends is not a given. Here’s why. Over the next several weeks, Europe will undoubtedly attempt to forestall any potential investigation by pulling the United States into an endless, futile negotiation in which they promise to fix every problem, but in reality simply run out the clock on addressing the issues.

The administration would be wise to avoid getting dragged into such a pointless endeavor that will tie it up in years of bureaucracy and result in an imaginary, never-concluded deal.

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We’ve seen this movie before. During the Obama years, the United States entered negotiations with Europe for the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (TTIP). The process ran for three long years without ever producing a final agreement, absorbing time and attention but doing little to address imbalances or alter the underlying trajectory of the trade relationship.

The stakes are far too high for a repeat feature. The most consequential distortion in the transatlantic relationship is unfolding in the regulatory treatment of digital services and platforms. Here, the terms of competition are increasingly being set by a European agenda that is unmistakably protectionist. This unfair arrangement cannot continue, and it’s high time we got to the bottom of it. 

Europe has spent years building a digital regulatory regime that places unique burdens on American technology companies. What it presents as neutral governance to promote so-called European “digital sovereignty” has, in practice, concentrated restrictions on a small group of U.S.-based platforms while leaving domestic competitors largely untouched. And as digital innovation becomes more central to economic and national security, that targeted enforcement has only intensified in scope and scale.

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Europe has already directed roughly $5 billion in data-privacy penalties at American companies, often in the name of “fair competition” or “consumer protection.” At the same, it forces firms like Apple, Google, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft to delay product launches, strip out features, or offer watered-down versions of their services under the EU’s Digital Markets Act (DMA), Digital Services Act (DSA) and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). Comparable scrutiny of non-U.S. competitors has been far less evident.

More recently, that posture has turned even more aggressive. European authorities raided the Paris offices of X in February, following months of investigations and a €120 million fine imposed without any detailed basis for the charge until a U.S. House Committee subpoenaed the decision.

Now European officials are rewriting their proposed Digital Networks Act (DNA) to insert new “network usage fees” that would fall almost entirely on U.S. firms. This, despite a prior commitment in a recent joint U.S.-EU trade framework to avoid such fees. Slipping them into the DNA framework amounts to a deliberate breach of that agreement.

This is not exactly the record of a neutral regulator or a reliable trade ally. Nor is there much indication that Europe intends to ease its push to reshape the digital marketplace through protectionist policies that deliberately single out the United States.

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A Section 301 investigation is needed into these practices, to address discriminatory digital regulation. It would allow the United States to formally assess European practices and provide it with important leverage should the United States wish to enter negotiations after completing the process. 

In the meantime, Europe should abandon its campaign and support a fair playing field. Although European nations complain about a lack of “digital sovereignty” and U.S. dominance, the truth is American firms are, in fact, dependent on European energy systems and connectivity for their data center infrastructure. The wiser play for Europe would be to continue maximizing excellence in these areas, complementing the strengths of the United States through fair competition.

There may be a time and place for further negotiations. But for now, the United States must establish the magnitude of the problem, which can only come through a 301 investigation. Europe cannot be allowed to stall while expanding its regulatory reach, and exporting its discriminatory model to other countries, including right here in the Western Hemisphere.

President Trump and his trade team must not enter into what would be an ill-fated, fruitless discussion with the Europeans. Bluntly put, entering into talks now would be a trap. A Section 301 investigation into European digital protectionism is a necessity. 

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